3The three-part structure of The Journals, on the surface, seems to obey a sequential logic, the poems “carry[ing] out the narrative of the persona’s life” (RELKE 15), all the more so as some of the events which appear in the poems are directly taken from Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853). Each of the three periods – 1832-1840, 1840-1871, 1871-1969 – is associated with a collage which appears opposite the title page, and is identified with a locale: first the wilderness, then the reassuring domesticity of an interior scene, and finally an urban scenery. While Atwood herself, in the Afterword, stresses the linear progression of the discovery of self and place leading to emplacement (JSM 63), the poems resist and subvert this overall structure. My contention, indeed, is that generating The Journals’ poetics is less the resolution of the postcolonial dialectic place-displacement, than a creative engagement with the ways in which the disruptions brought about by displacement allow for visual and poetic experimentation unsettling representations of space.

Landscape, langscape, thingscape

5The first journal opens onto the inaugural encounter with the New World whose description is introduced by the landscaping term “vistas” (JSM 11). The ordered, unifying vision from afar it traditionally promises, however, is immediately hindered by a list juxtaposing aspects with no indication of composition. What gives the minimal description its cohesion are the adjectives (“barren,” “bone-white,” “alien,” JSM 11) indexing the persona’s inner recoil which is then displaced onto the landscape itself. Endowed with volition, it refuses to acknowledge Moodie’s presence, therefore resisting being transformed into an object before her eyes, a mere site for sights: “the moving water will not show me // my reflection,” “The rocks ignore” (JSM 11). Each phrase, isolated on the space of the page, rings with a definitiveness which excludes negotiation or assuagement. Following a recurring motif identified by Atwood in Survival (ATWOOD 54), the perception of an indifferent nature soon gives way to the persona’s suspicions that she is surrounded by hostile forces and the first journal, which covers Moodie’s time in the bush, is pervaded by the sense of an ominous and elusive presence as she “hears // malice in the trees’ whispers” (JSM 13) and glimpses “a malignant face // flicker[ing] over [her] shoulder” in the forest (JSM 15). The persona’s sense of estrangement from her physical environment is visually translated in the first collage which disrupts the very aesthetic model to which “vistas” pertain. Whereas in the tradition of landscape painting, the presence of human figures gives a sense of scale and endows the natural scenery with human significance, the female silhouette in the collage hangs in the space of the page against the background of the dark mass of trees. The framing of the image and the collage technique not only preclude a stable focal point which would direct the circulation of the viewer’s gaze, they hinder the illusion of depth created by perspectival composition, thereby conveying an impression of impenetrable and inhospitable space.

Resolve: to be both tentative and hard to startle
[…]
in this area where my damaged
knowing of the language means
prediction is forever impossible (JSM 15)

When will be
that union and each
thing (bits
of surface broken by my foot
step) will without moving move
around me
into its place (JSM 21; emphasis mine)

9The extended run-on line and the circumvallated syntax throw into relief the alignment of the two final prepositional phrases. Both point to a process of topical convergence which echoes the concluding stanza of the following poem:

Two fires in-
formed me,
[…]
left charred marks
now around which I
try to grow (JSM 23; emphasis mine)

10The winter fire that destroys the forest around the log cabin and the summer fire that destroys it are presented as potential foundational events both forming and informing the persona and her relationship to place. Like the footprints in “Paths and Thingscape,” the “charred marks” left by the “shapeless raging” of the fires (JSM 23) become signs endowed with human significance which could operate as a center of orientation structuring boundless and indiscriminate space from within. Thingscapes, consequently, do not merely reveal the inadequacy of old paradigms, but point to “the complex working of placedness as such” (MALPAS 22) as it becomes evident in the immigrant’s efforts to become settled.

The un-settled settler

11The Journals reframe the inaugural encounter with the New World by dissociating it from the originary moment of arrival which is continuously deferred. As the collages intimate with the silhouette pasted onto the scenery, the persona never comes to fully inhabit either the bush or Belleville where her family moves at the end of the second journal. Displacement, indeed, is an ongoing process comprised of “repeated acts of erasure and formation” (SMYTH 36) which un-settle the settler, Atwood disengaging the noun from the idea of re-emplacement attached to it.

13The illustration which immediately follows “Departure from the Bush” and ushers the reader into the second journal departs from the visual translation of the poetic text that characterizes the previous collages. The anguished figure in the first illustration of the sequence is replaced by an image of peaceful domesticity with the inset engraving whose composition is a pictorial trope reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch interiors. Dominating the page is a drawing of the wilderness that is less represented than suggested by the blurry silhouettes of trees amidst which an unidentifiable animal form seems to be lurking. Along with the blatant disregard for proportions, the placement of the inset upsets traditional figurative composition rules, which complicates the reading of the spatial relations between the two places represented, and exposes the dualisms and contradictions underpinning the idea of wilderness. What the collage may be seen as suggesting, the poems of the second journal bring to the fore. Although they cover Moodie’s time in Belleville from 1840 to 1871, with the exception of “1837 War in Retrospect” and “Charivari,” they all hark back to persona’s life in the bush through dreams and memories which disrupt temporal and spatial boundaries as in “Dream 3: Night Bear.” An incident, which found its way into Susanna Moodie’s memoirs in the guise of a humorous “anecdote” (JSM 38), surface “from beneath stories” (JSM 38) as a dream conflating past and present, the wilderness and Belleville. The dream logic informs a series of antithetic statements in which the persona simultaneously asserts that which she has refuted and refutes that which she has asserted, a series that crucially hinges on a substitution of deictic adverbs. The eponymous bear, a synecdoche for wilderness, does not belong to a separate space, existing over “there” where Moodie no longer is (JSM 38); it appears “here // in this visible kitchen” (JSM 39), a line which cannot but point the reader back to the collage. Significantly, the poem progresses towards a synesthetic shift as the spectacle of the moving bear is likened to a “tenuous […] echo,” before being troped as “a mute vibration passing // between [the persona’s] ears” (JSM 39). Unlike what happens in the illustration, which necessarily frames what it represents, if only because of the physicality of the page, the poem alludes to an inchoate presence, the wilderness as soundscape having no fixed boundaries.

14The anxiety underlying “Night Bear” and the other two dream poems of the sequence has been the object of much critical attention, the most common response being that it evinces Moodie’s inability to come to terms with the land. I would contend that such anxiety has to be read in relation to a concern for the impermanence of human traces which is captured in the much quoted “bush garden,” an oxymoron bringing together the forces of culture and nature, the domesticated and the untamed. The former has taken over the latter in “that garden,” “deserted” by its inhabitants, reclaimed by the wilderness and “gone to seed” (JSM 34). The dead metaphor is given a new semantic charge by the persona’s ability to see life “pulsing” in the soil (JSM 34). The grotesque animal analogies – “pale grubs,” “fleshy snouts,” “amphibian hearts” (JSM 34) – register inner revulsion which intensifies with the image of flesh being violently torn by the hands that pull vegetation from the ground:

I should have known
anything planted here
would come up blood (JSM 34)

15Beyond the violence of the conclusion, somewhat muted by the flatness of tone, the poem as a whole participates in an ongoing reflection in the sequence on the act of human grounding through which “here” becomes place. The Journals, indeed, consistently subvert the equation between cultivating and settling indexed by the term “to plant” (OED). The planters’ efforts to clear the land and carve an enclave out of the wilderness are scaled down to a “stumpy patch” with a “few rows // of string beans and dusty potatoes” (JSM 16). But it is the planters’ “deny[ing] the ground they stand on” which prevents the plunging of roots (JSM 16). Far from being a neutral referent, “ground” serves as a verbal trope. It draws attention to the way the forward-looking impetus of project – “the future” (JSM 16) – forestalls the formation of a meaningful relation to the land as possible habitat by ignoring its singularity which the persona forcefully re-inscribes through the insistent use of demonstratives: “this dirt,” “these trees,” “this particular sun” (JSM 17).

16Where the agricultural endeavor fails to transform space into place, the act of “plant[ing]” one’s dead temporarily brings about “a new covenant which binds [the poetic voice] to the land” (JOHNSTON n.p.). The evocation of the death of the persona’s young son heavily draws upon the imagery of colonial journeys. The boy becomes a figure of exploration, the moment of drowning a moment of discovery whereby he gains access to the secret knowledge of the land which eludes his mother. For Moodie, the migrant who has been “float[ing] on a land” she “could not touch to claim” (JSM 30), his death marks both the end of her journey and the inaugural moment when her “foot hit rock” after she “plant[ed] him in this country // like a flag” (JSM 31). The lines, which conspicuously draw upon traditional images of conquest, is a reminder that “the surest way to take possession of place and secure it as one’s own is to bury one’s dead in it” (POGUE HARRISON 354). The conditions of place-making, Robert Pogue Harrison argues, cannot be envisaged without the institution of burial. As evidenced by the phrases hic jacet, ‘here lies,’ the grave marker is “a shifter that refuses to shift” (POGUE HARRISON 352); however crude it may be, it is a sign that points to itself since it indicates its own mark in the ground, thereby appropriating it (POGUE HARRISON 351). The body, once buried, becomes the “cairn of [Moodie’s] plans and future charts,” both a memorial and a landmark of human presence providing the new land with a center and “drawing a boundary of belonging around it” (POGUE HARRISON 352). Only then does the environment “le[ap] into solidity” (JSM 31).

18The poem’s denial of rootedness and permanence traditionally associated with the notion of place is reciprocated in the collage. Its effectiveness resides in the relationship between the pictured family, in the foreground, and the clearing in the middle ground. The composition may be read as a parody of the paintings commissioned by the landed gentry in eighteenth century England, paintings in which artists “record the extent and quality of their patron’s estates, or […] locate their sitters within a world that was proposed as the sitters’ rightful domain, or both” (HARRISON 213). Landscape does not merely serve as a decorative background but is viewed and represented as property, and “the relationship of pictured figure to pictorial ground” depends on notions of land management and land ownership: what the landscape is seen to contain sustains the power and authority of the figures who stand “enclosed by that space, yet detached from it” (HARRISON 213). In Atwood’s collage, the human figures are separated from the landscape by a sharp border of white whose function seems to be as much to distinguish as to keep apart. The viewer does not meet the confident and self-satisfied gaze of the painted figures, as in Gainsborough’s celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c. 1750), or in Arthur Devies’s lesser-known The James Family (1751), but is confronted with blurry ghost-like figures. In a similar fashion, we are not granted an image of propitious landscape with abundant crops and luscious orchards; instead, we are presented with a “desert of tree-stumps like wounds” (WEIR 75). By drawing upon and subverting the codes of eighteenth-century landscape painting, the collage undermines the assumption of property as a way of inhabiting place on which the idea of settling is predicated.

Displacement / dysplacement: genius (de)loci

19If the foundational gesture is doomed to fail, how, then, are we to interpret the last illustration in The Journals? The human figure is no longer superimposed onto the scenery and the white border surrounding it in the previous illustrations has disappeared. The image is neatly divided into two: in the upper-half, a nineteenth-century engraving of an urban scene represents “the polite world of society and chat” (WEIR 75) to which the poems cursorily allude (JSM 37, 42, 47); in the bottom half, a female silhouette, seemingly reaching out to the surface, represents Moodie after death. The blurred white ovals where the eyes would be are reminiscent of the line “opal // no // eyes glowing” in “Wish: Metamorphosis to Heraldic Emblem” (JSM 49), a poem in which the persona imagines herself in the afterlife, liberated from the constraints of civility. In the bathetic evocation of her own death and burial (“when I am dipped in the earth // I will be much smaller,” JSM 49), the reader will recognize Moodie’s “other voice” which acknowledges inconvenient truths unsuitable for “hushed tones” and “uplifting verse” (JSM 42). The poem, however, soon shifts to the idea of metamorphosis. The accumulation of images, compounded with the irregular typography, upsets sequential logic as words such as “plumage,” “uncorroded,” and “opal” are loosened from the syntactic structure to suggest new configurations which collapse the distinction between organic and mineral, human and non-human. The broken syntax builds up a sense of unrepressed exhilaration at the prospect of letting the “puckered mind” finally “prowl and slink // in crystal darkness” (JSM 49). The underground and resurrection poems that close the sequence bring about the completion of this becoming-wilderness which, unlike what happens in the first and second journals, is eagerly anticipated and fully embraced. In life, “the air // was about to tell [Moodie] // all kinds of answers” (JSM 51), the persona teetering on the cusp of revelation. In death, her eyes at once blinded and opened as specular cognition gives way to vision, she “see[s] now” (JSM 58) the “truth” (JSM 13) which has until now eluded her: the primacy of nature itself for “at the last // judgment we will all be trees” (JSM 59).

21“Alternate Thoughts from Underground” and “A Bus Along St Clair,” the last poem of the sequence, offer a clue as to the perceived necessity of this endeavor. In the urban setting where a “wilderness of wires” (JSM 60), “glass and steel” (JSM 57) has taken over the primeval forest, the forward impetus of progress, with its promises of “silver paradise” (JSM 60) and “riveted Babylon” (JSM 57), entails the same blindness as the early planters’. Both poems are informed by the equation between the urban taking over the natural environment and a form of erasure and oblivion. The mournful tone of “Alternate Thoughts” becomes defiant when the poetic voice stakes her claim on the land – “this is my kingdom still” (JSM 60) – and addresses an unidentified and encompassing “you”:

turn, look down:
there is no city;
this is the center of a forest

your place is empty (JSM 61)

22To the persona’s displacement, the last line of The Journals substitutes the dysplacement of the addressee, “the diminution and dissolution of the experience of place itself” (CASEY 104) caused by the cultural and ecological amnesia underpinning the “conversion of space into mere sites for building” (CASEY 104).

23Reading the sequence almost fifty years after its first publication, the critic cannot but underline what Atwood’s own version of settler nationalism erases in the Afterword. Her assessment of the Canadian experience of displacement which the present paper takes as its point of entrance into the poems, ignores the originary claims of those who are neither “exiles” nor “invaders” (JSM 62) and whose discourse of autochthony was disrupted by the colonial appropriation of indigenous places. And yet, however flawed the Afterword reveals itself to be with hindsight, however enlightening it still is with regards to the intention of Atwood the writer and cultural critic, I would argue that the poetic form, the emphasis on dislocation and displacement both thematically and formally eschew the totalizing temptation of cultural nationalism. Throughout the sequence, the sparseness of language and syntactical distortions produce discontinuous and at times discordant aphorisms and epigrams whose meaning is neither stable nor neatly circumscribed. “Solipsism while Dying” and “Thoughts from the Underground” may thus be read as a meta-poetic reflection on place “as a discourse in process” (ASHCROFT 155). The typographic distortion of the toponym “toroNTO”, as well as the question “Where will be Belleville?” (JSM 53) underscore, if need be, that place is the product of constant shifting relations since there is no “simple separation between the ‘place’ named and described in language, and some ‘real’ place inaccessible to it” (ASHCROFT 155). “Forget[ing oneself] // in the middle // of sentences” can accordingly be construed as both a symptom of psychological dislocation and as a disruptive force opening the “enclose[ing]” frames (JSM 52) which seek to transform place into a static and circumscribed territory. Significantly, the persona last appears in The Journals in the guise of an old lady whose “eyes […] destroy[…] the walls, the ceiling” (JSM 61), an image which harks back to the opening poem and subverts comforting assumptions of stability. In that regard, Atwood’s Moodie may be less a genius loci than a genius deloci.